Elsa Undone

WORDS OF ADVICE

by Fay Weldon

Random House. 215 pages. $7.95

This mannered little comedy of bedroom hanky-panky aspires after wickedness--the word Nabokovian is used wistfully in the dust-jacket copy--and achieves naughtiness instead. But that is enough to sustain Author Fay Weldon's fifth novel, one of those lazy summer afternoon collusions in which the writer feels superior to her characters, and the reader smiles at the writer.

Victor is a 44-year-old antique dealer, newly escaped from a dull marriage and a dull office job. Elsa is 19 and his mistress. "A year ago, when Victor was still a tax accountant, he fished Elsa out of his typists' pool. She flapped and wriggled a little, and then lay still, legs gently parted." This plummy pair is to spend the weekend cataloguing marketable monstrosities at the mansion of Hamish, an elderly millionaire, and his beautiful, young, crippled wife Gemma.

It is with Gemma that naughtiness enters the picture. She has cooked up a scheme--unnecessarily devious, since no one seriously opposes it--for Hamish to lie with Elsa, who will then hatch out the child that she, Gemma, wants but cannot give birth to. She herself, more to serve iniquity than to requite passion, will bed with Victor. "Love," she tells Elsa, is "gene calling to gene, as country cats call to each other across fields."

With so many genes busily at work, all would seem to be well with the author's warm-weather fiction. But Novelist Weldon is much too fond of the kind of ornateness that clutters Iris Murdoch's lesser novels--in this case, the ponderous idea that Hamish is Rumpelstiltskin and Elsa is the poor girl for whom he spins straw into gold. Gemma insists that Elsa do huge batches of typing each night. Elsa can't manage it, but Hamish can.

Straw into gold--but what's the point? The remainder of the fairy tale requires that the girl guess Rumpelstiltskin's name or give up her first-born child to him, and sure enough, Hamish's origins are unknown, at least to Elsa and the reader. Gemma ultimately reveals her husband's identity at the end of an amusing but overlong story of her introduction to sin.

For a time, though, the reader entertains the ghastly suspicion that the author has distorted her comedy in order to convey some symbolic code message. Not at all; the novel hasn't an idea in its head, and rightly so. If the Rumpelstiltskin business had been chucked out with Weldon's first draft, her account of Elsa's undoing could have scaled the foothills of superior nonsense.

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